Be Brave

If you’re game developer, you’re an entrepreneur. Even if you’re not in it for money, the amount of physical material, labor, and funding you’ll need to organize to make your game real will make you into an entrepreneur. It’s a scary prospect. Game developers, who specialize in creating products people want but don’t need, are especially vulnerable. As you’d expect, the Internet has capitalized on this fear, and is rife with blogs and thinkpieces ceaselessly extolling the virtues of persistence and hard work. Just take a look at these Google results…

It’s baked into our culture, especially the United States, how important hard work and persistence are. All these articles are just confirming what most of already know. It’s idle palaver that just so happens to generate a lot of ad revenue. You don’t need to learn how to work hard and persist: you need to learn how to be brave.

You have to learn a lot of skills from scratch, including product testing, marketing and promotion, accounting, and fulfillment.

I could go on for a long time, but you get the point. There’s a lot of very valid things to be afraid of.

Don’t squash your fears. Spell them out. Write them down and look at them with honesty and sober understanding. Being brave is not about being fearless, it’s about understanding the nature of your fears and facing them with dignity. Fear is often what stops us before we reach true greatness. No amount of rattled-off platitudes about putting in 70 hour weeks or doing the same thing for 10 years until you get your big break will sate these fears. We face our fears through self-reflection first and persistence second.

You can do this. I believe in you.

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